Last week, PC Perspective wrote about the OnLive Beta. OnLive is a “thin client” that promises users the ability to stream their favorite games over the Internet to any hardware, from netbooks to mobile phones, regardless of the native hardware specs of the device. PC Perspective said the technology worked well for certain types of games, but lag was a factor, and now OnLive has responded, essentially saying “blame the speed of light.” Oi.

According to OnLive, the beta version of the service is linked to a single location, ISP and client… limitations that will not be present in the final service. Shift any of those factors around, and lag increases dramatically. What this means, according to OnLive, is that there was literally no way for PC Perspective to get a good experience.

“The reason location is so critical is because of the speed of light. If you are more than 1,000 miles from an OnLive data center, then the round trip communications delay (‘ping’ time) between your home and OnLive will be too long for fast-action video games… Your Beta account will only connect to the data center it was originally assigned to. So, if you are assigned to our West Coast data center and then try your Beta account from the Midwest or East Coast, you’ll find the lag impaired to the point where most games are unplayable. And, depending on how your Beta account was configured for the characteristics of your home ISP, you may see degraded image quality or controller/mouse performance on a different ISP.”

This makes sense: OnLive has always boasted that they were going to try to match each user with a data center within 100 miles of the player, to minimize lag. I’m still skeptical, though: the states 100ms pings OnLive says is enough to fool people into thinking a game is happening instantaneously is a huge amount of time indeed when it comes to FPS and RTS titles.